[Insert Programming Language] Bashing

Everybody who has been programming for a while hopefully has found their favorite programming language(s), framework(s) and tools. From my Category Cloud, you can easily find out where I feel most fluent and comfortable, and the “comfort zones” are constantly evolving and/or changing. (I should really add ASP.Net MVC and JavaScript to that list 😉 )

Going hand in hand is the tendency of avoiding other languages, etc., due to lack of knowledge, experience, or because they are considered technically inferior. Recently, I came across a couple of pages bashing PHP, such as on Coding Horror (again!) referring to this blog which analyses the shortcomings of that language.

I guess, while this criticism will have no impact on Real PHP Programmers ™, it should certainly influence people evaluating other languages to avoid it, since the technical reasons NOT to start a PHP project seem overwhelming. (this here deals with “loose comparison“, as documented on PHP.net, and compared to Perl)

So is PHP special? Let’s ask Google:

language + “bashing”

hist

PHP bashing

8.500.000

td>VB.Net bashing

3.200.000

Powershell bashing

3.000.000 *

VisualBasic bashing

2.300.000

Delphi bashing

1.600.000

C# bashing

1.300.000

JavaScript bashing

1.200.000

VBA bashing

600.000

Java bashing

600.000

VB bashing

500.000

Powershell reports 3 million hits, but from the first look that’s mostly due to comparisons of Powershell with Bash and other shells.

Let’s have a look at databases

database + “bashing”

hist

MySQL bashing

3.000.000

Oracle bashing

500.000

SQL Server bashing

300.000

MySQL, SQLite, and Postgres are difficult to compare, again because of references to Bash shell programming.

Superficially judging from the numbers, I think we have a winner, though.